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Screener release reduces false reads

Version 7.0 of Genedata's Screener lead-discovery system was unveiled at IBC's Drug Discovery & Development conference in Boston last week. The upgraded version of the enterprise system for high-throughput and high-content screening analyses provides "statistically sound" processing of complex data sets, according to a company announcement.

The enterprise platform has reduced false-positives by 50 percent while increasing productivity by as much as 80 percent, following development work done for the Amgen Lead Discovery Informatics (ALDI) system in conjunction with the biotech giant. In that work, Screener helped align five research sites previously using different research tools and processes, leading to the improvements in false positives and false negatives, says a company spokesperson, as well as the productivity improvement: an acceleration of assay set-up time to less than 30 minutes.

Also on the screening front: ChemNavigator has been bought by Sigma-Aldrich. The drug-discovery software maker provides the big life sciences company with virtual screening tools that it can offer to chemists, allowing them to channel chemical designs toward commercially available compounds, the company says. The acquisition links ChemNavigator tools and 60-million-compound searchable database with Sigma-Aldrich offerings in chemical compound management, procurement and distribution.

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